Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: I read two of your books here, Parenting With Patience and Discipline Without Distress. I'm getting deep into your methods here and really liking what I found. So I thought it would be cool to start out with little bit of your story and how you got started in this whole parenting thing. I mean, you've now written how many books? It's a ton of books at this point, it's hard to keep track, and to have built this whole empire with these workshops and webinars that you do, what kicked it off?

Judy: Well, thank you first for having this interview. How I first got into parenting was: I grew up with a few, what we call ACEs, so adverse childhood experiences. So when I had my first child, I didn't really have any good models in which to learn parenting. So I decided to read a lot of books, attended a lot of courses and I had it all figured out. And then by the time my second son came along, as you know, all kids are different and what was working for first child didn't work for second child. So I tried other tips and tricks. And by the time I had five kids, I had a whole variety of temperament, personalities, but I found out that non-punitive parenting worked for every child, no matter what their personality or background.

Judy: So then I raised five teenagers. My youngest right now is 17 and I have never punished them, never taken their phone away, never taken the door off the room. And we have a really great relationship. And I thought, I got to write a book on this because there are other parents out there. A lot of my friends, parents too, raise their kids with no punishment and their kids turned out fine. And there's this myth out there that teens naturally rebel, the teen years are really hard. And it's not true. If you build a good, non-punitive, respectful, caring relationship with kids, you're going to reap the benefits in the teen years. And that's why I've written four books.

Andy: Oh, so four. Okay. I thought that was cool. You mentioned that in one of your books that when your first two kids were around nine years old, or something like that, you then had this epiphany moment of realizing that punishments don't work and that you didn't want to ever punish your kids again. And then your younger kids were completely raised without ever having any kind of punishments at all. So what was the epiphany moment that propelled you into realizing that?

Judy: Well, in a lot of the books I read, there's very few books that advocate non-punishment. So a lot of books say, "Oh, we do positive parenting," and then they tell you how to do timeouts and how to issue consequences. And, like a lot of parents, I was confused and I thought, "Ooh, consequences are okay; that's positive discipline," but they're not. And the epiphany moment was when my child was eight and I issued a consequence and he said, "Mom, it's you imposing it on me. I'm not choosing the consequence." And I also realized that it impacted our communication because he felt really disrespected. He felt that I was being too hard and he wasn't having input into problem solving. So then at that moment I decided I'm giving everything up: timeouts, consequences. I'm going to treat my kids like I treat my partner and we're just going to problem solve everything. And the funny thing is that it works really well if people trust the process. Kids love the process and it does work.

Andy: Sure. So you talk about problem solve everything, but then it's a little more complicated than that because, as you have in this book: Parenting With Patience, a three-step method and you start out with taking a timeout from whatever's going on and that's the period where you calm down, I think, and then you take like a time-in where you really connect and active listener, empathize I think, with what is going on with the kid. And then you have the problem solve, is more like step three, from the way I read this, where then that's when you do collaborative problem solving with the kid and figure out what the solution is going to be.

Judy: That's right, yeah. I think, in all kinds of families, feeling angry is normal. It's normal for kids. It's normal for parents. And if there's one tip I can tell parents, in looking back over my 27 years of parenting, it's that we have the executive function skills. We need to get a grip of our anger first.

Andy: The kid is not going to do it.

Judy: Yeah. You can't expect kids to do it. Somebody has to be calm. So take time out, take a half an hour, take 20 minutes to just calm down before you say or do anything. Put the kids in a safe place if they're little. If they're older kids, just tell them you're going to take a timeout for yourself and calm down and come back and deal with this. And then everybody's calm. You can put your heads together and fix things together. Now, for little kids, after the parent's calm, which is step one, step two is: you have to help them calm down because they don't have that self-control ability yet to self-regulate and they need an adult's help. So get yourself calm, get your child calm, solve the problem. It's easy three steps.

Andy: It's funny that you jump right to talking about anger because that's what I noticed was really a theme in a lot of the book. And I think you're so right. What parents have problems with is discipline. But step one is getting control of your own anger because the discipline is related to, a lot of times, is punitive. You are mad at the kid and you want to punish them or get back at them a little bit. When we're angry and our amygdala is going crazy, it's really hard to think rationally and sit there and come to a rational agreement with the kid. And I noticed that so much of your book was about managing your own anger as a parent and then helping your kid to manage and deal with their anger and helping them to learn strategies for how to communicate about it using these I-statements. But I wonder if you could talk just a little bit more deeply about: as a parent, what do you do in that situation to start getting control of your anger?

Judy: For a parent, I think getting control is, at first, accepting that you are angry, that you feel angry and that's okay. Feelings are okay. We have limits on behavior. So I list about 70 ways to neutralize your anger in the moment, which is the next step. And one of my favorites right now is to go in the bathroom and yell in the toilet and flush it. And that way I'm not yelling at my child. I am feeling my anger, but I am dealing with it in a way that doesn't scare anyone. And I get a very clean toilet too. And then sometimes I just need time to get away and think about what I'm going to say, what I'm going to do.

Judy: And then I can come back to the person and resolve it. So for example, if my son just swore at me, I would walk away and get a grip of my anger, formulate what I'm going to say, come back and use my I-statement. I would say, "I'm upset that I get sweared at because it doesn't feel respectful," And then resolve it with them. But anger is normal. Every parent feels anger. And I think our first instinct is we want to hurt back, and that's when we say, "You're grounded for the next 30 years." And then we're never going to follow through on it because when we're not angry anymore we.

Andy: And you feel bad.

Judy: Right? We look like we don't have any integrity.

Andy: Yeah. We're not consistent with ourselves anymore. Totally.

Judy: Yes.

Andy: So the solution is not to have made the threat that you don't want to keep in the first place, which means that we really need to get good at this anger management strategies. I like that you start out with accepting it because I think a lot of times we feel like we shouldn't be feeling that way and that just makes it impossible to deal with it if you're not accepting it. But a lot of times we try to tell ourselves like, "Oh, I'm not. No, I'm not. I'm not mad," but it's not really productive, right?

Judy: No. It's okay to say, "I'm angry. I'm feeling really angry right now," and we own it. When we say I'm angry, we own it. And then it's up to us.

Andy: "I'm not angry. I'm not. I'm not that. No, it's okay." I feel like that's the instinct a lot of times though, for some reason, is to just try and think if we just don't talk about it it'll just go away.

Andy: You have a lot of sections in both of your books that specifically talk about teenagers, which I thought was so cool. And one of them is about how the teenage version of anger, a lot of times, is attitude. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Judy: Yes. Anger in little kids tend to come out in different ways than teenagers and anger in teenagers can be silence, it can be behaviors like door slamming or backpack throwing or attitudes: snarkiness. And I think it's important for parents to just, again, take a timeout, sit and think about giving the teen some space. A lot of times it's not about us. Maybe it's something that's happened at school, something that's happened with her friends, something online that's maybe they've been trumped in a video game and they're angry about that. And then we come and say, "Hey, how come you didn't take out the garbage?" Now they're doubly angry.

Judy: And of course, we're handy targets because we love them and they know that. So first of all, just don't take it personally, give them some space to calm down. By the teenagehood they shouldn't be hitting or throwing things anymore. Although I have had teens that have pushed down their chair after a bad video game. But give them some space. For example, my kids, when they're mad, they will stomp up to their rooms, close the door loudly and have a good cry, or whatever, and I need to give them some space. You have to respect that, but they also want you to come up and talk to them. They do. Anyone who is angry wants people to notice and they want people to care.

Andy: Especially if that's why you're making noise up there.

Judy: Yes!

Andy: And shutting the door noisily to remind that, "I'm up here, please come up."

Judy: "Hey, I'm angry."

Andy: Yeah, right.

Judy: And they don't want parents to come up and lecture them. They want parents to come out and say, "Hey, I know you're angry. What's going on?" And listen.

Andy: So when you hear the attitude, that is such a trigger, I think, for parents a lot of times. And so I see with this method, I guess you got to recognize that it pisses you off and then find a more healthy way to deal with your reaction to it, so that you can then recognize that that attitude of your teenager probably means that there's something else going on with them that maybe they need your help a little bit to deal with it.

Judy: Yes. Attitude is definitely: they're not happy about something but they can't really say it in a respectful way that adults learn to say.

Andy: Yeah. They don't have those tools yet, or those skills.

Judy: Right. They're learning the language and they learn the language from you. So when we use our I-statements, that's the respectful way to let someone know you're unhappy about something. They need to learn that language. So rather than saying, "You always make me do chores," or, "You're the worst parent," they need to say, "I'm unhappy because I have a full schedule and I feel chores are being laid on me." So we need to teach them the respectful language and not get angry at their practicing, how it comes out in snarky.

Andy: The thing is, you write about this in these books how kids need to learn these skills and I'm like: wow, a lot of adults I know need to learn these skills of being able to communicate your needs and be assertive about your needs in a nice way to people, in a way that is respectful and maintains the relationship. I think it's a skill that everybody needs, not just teenagers, but especially they're really getting these skills of relationships during that time in life. So it's just, I think, something that's so important. So I felt like I learned a lot about how I should communicate with people in my life from reading this section on I-statements, your collaborative problem solving. Could you just walk us through a little bit how that work? You mentioned an example of it earlier, but how do you do that and come up with the right formula for those I-statements.

Judy: Okay. So an I-statement, generally a confrontive one, is usually three parts and it conveys a feeling, a description of what the behavior is and the effect on a person. So when I say to my teenager, "I'm feeling annoyed because I would like to make dinner, but there are dishes all over the counter that are not put away yet." So my teenager then knows how I'm feeling. So they either do it or not. So if they don't do it, then we go into problem solving. And if you don't punish kids, teens especially, they're willing to problem solve with you because they have some skin in the game.

Judy: So then we go into problem solving mode. Let's say that they can't do it right now, they're in the middle of a game. So I look at their needs. Their needs is: they've committed to a game for the next 20 minutes, but my needs are: I need to make dinner and I need a clean counter. So then we brainstorm together some options really quickly, just standing up quickly brainstorming. And then we figure out which one works for both of us and we do it. It's very simple, but you're right. It gives them skills for future relationships when they have problems with their bosses, their friends, their future mother-in-law. These are all good people skills.

Andy: Because you have even an example in your book where two kids are in a conflict, you sit them down. First, you do the calming and then sitting them down and figuring out what the situation is between them and then giving them each the words to use an I-statement to communicate to the other one what they're feeling. In that situation with the teenager, with the dishes out on the counter and you're going up and then the video game, would you then give the teenager the words to then communicate? "Okay, so could you tell me that you're in the middle of a video game and you're feeling..." Or would you elicit that information and then deal with the situation or is younger ages the ages for actually giving them the words and by the time it's a teenager you do it more in a collaborative way, or would you continue to do that in the teenage years? The way you did in that story in the book?

Judy: I would do both actually. I mean, if you're raising kids with I-statements, you teach them as young as two.

Andy: Wow.

Judy: And then you keep going, but you can start at any time. We do classes for parents of teens and, over a month, when the parents are starting to use I-statements, and they teach the teens how to use the words and they can get it at any time, absolutely. But it helps when it becomes their native language and you start earlier, but there's no perfect time to do it. But yes, you have to teach kids the language, the words, especially the 'I' part, not the 'you' part, because when you say, "You make me feel," it puts the other person on the defensive and you don't get very far. But if you say, "Oh, I feel this way," no one can argue with that. That's how you feel. You own it. So maybe sit everyone down on a Sunday afternoon and have a training session. You can teach everyone in the family how to use I-statements and be more respectful to each other.

Andy: Yeah, that's cool and I like it. Yeah, making it about yourself too. I want to get good at this so I feel it's something we all could work on because it just seems like such a valuable skill, if everyone in your family is able to communicate their needs to each other and what they're feeling. We're not mind readers. Right?

Judy: Exactly, we're not mind readers. And I think the more people tell each other, "Wait," we also do preventative I-statements and positive I-statements too but the more we've talked to each other, the more we can resolve things respectfully.

Andy: Yeah. You point out that parents have to be like detectives, trying to figure out what a lot of times that the kid is trying to get some need met and there's an underlying need behind the behavior. And they're just don't know the right way to do it yet. And so they just need a little help maybe.

Judy: I think teens also need help in wondering what to do when they deliver an I-statement, for example, to a teacher. And the teacher doesn't handle it very well. And then we can teach kids how to active listen back to that teacher's resistance. And that's a really good relationship skill. It's very hard to do, but it is so helpful in their way to get along with authority figures and other people in their lives.

Andy: Yeah. And it's that getting to the point where they'll talk to you about those kinds of things and let you help them with those kinds of situations is, I think ,what you accomplish with not punishing them for everything. Because you talk about how, when you stop punishing them, it seems like there's this double thing going on where parents want their kids to be able to talk to them about everything but then the kid just knows that if they tell their parents certain things they're going to get punished. So when you stop punishing them, it seems like it just frees them up to feel more like you're on their side and that they could just talk to you about anything. That's really cool.

Judy: It's such a paradox. Parents think, "Oh, I want to talk to my teens. Why doesn't my teen open up to me?" And my first question is, "Well, do you punish them?" Because it's a simple, psychological fact that if people don't feel safe, they don't open to those painful...

Andy: Right.

Judy: And parents are no different. You don't get a free communication card just because you're a parent. Relationships are relationships and you build those, the trust and the respect, by not hurting other people. And it's a hard concept for parents to get, but it's so true. Kids will come to parents with any problem they have, any concern, if they know that their parents are on their side and will be their advocate and their help for fixing things.